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Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

WordPress Theme: BlueSands

August 15, 2007 – 7:41 am

BlueSands for WordPress is finally ready for release. It’s a 3-column, widget-ready theme with a fluid width main content area and is built on the famous Sandbox theme. As a result, BlueSands has much of the powerful markup that Sandbox has become known for, including special classes for preformatted text, code, and definition lists.

BlueSands also provides support for the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. Once WordPress 2.3 with the UTW tag importer is released, I’ll update this theme to replace the UTW sections with the native WordPress tagging system.

BlueSands represents about 20-25 hours worth of work, about two-thirds of that simply troubleshooting a couple of unfamiliar Sandbox elements. I’m very pleased with the final result, which receives a fair bit of inspiration from the Navigation theme, which I’ve always loved. BlueSands uses the colors from the WordPress dashboard to create a clean, crisp look with a minimal design.

Since I also use and love bbPress, I’ll be making a version of BlueSands for bbPress soon, as well. Once it’s ready, it will be available for download from the BlueSands page, along with the WordPress version, both individually and bundled together.

BlueSands

You can check out the full demo or download the theme from its home page. Bug reports, problems, or questions about BlueSands should be directed to my support forum.

BlueSands is released under a GNU General Public License.

Posted in WordPress | Comments (18)

BlueSands

August 11, 2007 – 11:40 pm

I’ve been working pretty steadily over the last several days to complete the theme that now adorns this blog. At this point, I’d say it’s about 90% complete. The 10% that remains involves a whole lot of tweaking and validating code before it’s ready for public release. I’m pretty excited about it. This is only my second WordPress theme, and it’s a far cry better than my first, if I do say so myself. I’ve been wanting to build a custom theme for awhile now, but I hadn’t really had the time until I started having all this back trouble – and even then it’s only been since two weeks after my surgery that I’ve even felt up spending this much time working on the code. As soon as I finish tweaking everything, I slap this sucker down on its own download page and post a formal release announcement.

I’m also planning to redo my bbPress theme to match, thus giving the two primary parts of my site a more cohesive look and feel. I suspect that one will also be a fair bit of work, though it will probably be much less work than creating my first bbPress theme, since I build this WordPress theme using the same colors with the end goal of creating the bbPress theme. Once I’m done with that, I’ll update the download page so that folks can have their option to download the WordPress theme, the bbPress theme, or both themes bundled together.

Also, with WordPress 2.3 coming out at some point later this year, I’ll update this theme to accommodate for tags being native and Ultimate Tag Warrior going the way of the dodo. That, however, should be a very easy tweak.

Posted in Design | Comments (2)

Learning PHP

August 3, 2007 – 1:50 pm

I’m sandboxing PHP today (not to be confused with playing with the Sandbox theme from the fine folks over at plaintxt.org), working on learning the code so that I can start coding the stuff from scratch, instead of just being able to hack other people’s work. I’ve been wanting to do this for awhile now, and well, I have quite a bit of free time on my hands these days, so this seems like as good a time as any to learn a new skill. I’ve got the PHP tutorial up in a tab, and I’m working through it step by step.

I’ve got at least a couple of plugins I’d like to write for WordPress, things that I haven’t seen anyone else put together yet. Trouble is, I don’t know enough yet to write these plugins myself. I plan to change that. And heck, maybe I’ll even be able to add my own weight to some of the WordPress development somewhere down the road.

Anyway, time’s a-wasting. Back to the tutorial. So far, I’m finding PHP coding to be pretty straightforward. But then again, I learned C Programming several years back. This really isn’t all that much different. It’s fun!

Posted in Design | Comments (0)

WordPress Plugin - Subscriber Gadget for myDashboard

August 1, 2007 – 8:40 pm

The Subscriber Gadget is an additional gadget for the myDashboard gadget library. It works in conjuction with two other plugins – the Subscribe to Comments plugin and the complementary WP View Subscriber Info plugins, the latter of which places a module in the default WordPress dashboard that shows you how much subscribers you have to your posts. myDashboard overwrites your default WordPress dashboard, and so the View Subscriber Info module is lost, as well. The Subscriber Gadget is a port of the View Subscriber Info module, putting your subscribers’ stats back on your dashboard where you can see them.

Installation:

Download, install, and configure the Subscribe to Comments plugin and the complementary WP View Subscriber Info plugins
Download the [download#6].
Upload subscriber-gadget.php to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory and activate it.
The gadget should now appear in your Gadgets Library in your dashboard for you to add and position from there.

Screenshot:

Subscriber Stats

Questions and bug reports should be directed to my support forum.

If you like this plugin, please consider making a donation to my tip jar:

Changelog:

2007.08.01 (v1.0)

Original release

Posted in Technology | Comments (10)

Bit by the Coding Bug

July 31, 2007 – 10:27 pm

I’m getting my inner geek on – again. I spent the majority of my day today trying to figure out how to crosspost from WordPress to MySpace. I’d found a hack that looked like it had potential that I messed with for quite a while, but so far I’ve had no success in getting it to run, despite having following the directions to the letter and checked everything over fifthlicate (and then some). I’m still waiting for a reply back on my comment to see if the hack’s author has any idea what’s blocking my attempts.

Ultimately, I gave up on that and started trying to find a way to put a light-weight Twitter badge on to my MySpace profile. I don’t like any of the badges that Twitter produces, so I looked around for other options. But of course, MySpace being the notoriously unfriendly environment that it is, there are no good solutions that are both functional and attractive on the page. So, I’ve given up on that option for the time being, as well.

In the meantime, I plan to learn a little more about the ins-and-outs of PHP coding tomorrow. I’ve got the MyDashboard plugin installed on this blog, but it doesn’t display quite as much information in the dashboard from some of my other behind-the-scenes plugins as I’m used to. So, my intent is to learn out to create a few gadgets that will tap into these plugins and put this information closer to my fingertips. If all goes well, I may even plan to create gadgets for a few other things that I’ve always wanted on the dashboard and never been able to find plugins for.

On that note, I’ve got a few of the plugin pages from the WordPress codex up in my browser. I really would like to get more involved with the development end of WordPress, but it is my sketchy knowledge of PHP that limits how much I can do. Since I have at least a two or three more weeks of down-time while I heal up from surgery, I hope to make some use of that time to learn a little more about how to write plugins for WordPress. I’ve come up with ideas in the past for things I’d love my WordPress installation to be able to do, things that, thus far, no one else has created plugins for. So, I hope to learn and add a few things to the WordPress community myself.

I’ve got other things to work on, as well. I still have plans to create a customized WordPress theme. I’d started work on a minimal theme last week, but that’s been on hiatus due to surgery last week. But now that I’m beginning to feel better and gain some more mobility again, I hope to get back to this project, as well, and try to finish it up. The skeleton I’d managed to build last week will probably undergo an overhaul, though, as I’ve changed my mind about some things in my mind about where I want to go with it. Heck, if I get really ambitious, I might even tailor a new bbPress theme to go with it.

Posted in Design | Comments (9)

Some New WordPress Plugins

July 30, 2007 – 11:21 am

I haven’t done one of these in a while, but I wanted to point out a handful of new plugins I’ve started using recently.

Better Comments Manager is another of those plugins that’s been added to my list of essentials for any WordPress installation. It adds a tab to your dashboard that allows you to view your comments with a host of new options. You can edit, delete, or unapprove comments and easily mark comments as spam, if necessary. You can also post a new or threaded reply right from the dashboard with an AJAX-powered interface. A single mouse-click will also filter comments to display only the comments for a given thread. It’s a powerful new comment interface that should be a must-have for any WordPress user.
Wordpress.com users are familiar with the Dashbar that appears on their site whenever they’re logged in that gives them instant access to most of their primary functions in an instant. The Dashbar plugin now gives this same toolbar functionality to self-hosted WordPress installations. It provides access to the dashboard, write panel, and editing ability for the last five entries from your site’s front page.
There’s been some buzz recently about the new wordpress.com application that’s been added to Facebook. Well, the FacePress plugin updates your Facebook news and mini feeds every time you post a new entry to your self-hosted WordPress installation. It’s a pretty slick little plugin and makes it that much easier to integrate Facebook and WordPress.
MyDashboard provides a cleaned-up dashboard interface that lets you pick and choose what elements you see when you log into your admin panel. There’s no documentation yet on how to create custom gadgets to add to this plugin, but as soon as there is, I’ll be looking to further customize this slick little plugin.
The Custom Write Panel provides the power through the use of toggle buttons and custom fields to create a series of customized write panels. It lets you remove some of the clutter and adds the ability to post specialized news items.

These are a great group of plugins. I urge you to give them a try and beef up your WordPress experience.

Posted in Technology | Comments (4)

Facebook versus MySpace

July 30, 2007 – 8:36 am

I’ve been running Facebook and MySpace side-by-side for a couple of weeks now. I’d created a MySpace profile primarily because it was the only method available for me to get back into contact with some of my friends from high school who I haven’t spoken to in ten years. Of course, long-time readers of this blog know how I feel about MySpace, but I was willing to deal with the evils of the social networking site if it meant being able to ‘talk’ to some people I hadn’t seen in a long time.

Then, of course, WordPress announces the fact that they’ve added a wordpress.com application to Facebook. So, being the WP fanboy that I am, I immediately set up a profile there, as well – and found three times as many of my friends already there than there were on Facebook. Lunacy. And to make things even better, I found a plugin this morning that will also allow self-hosted instances of WordPress (from the wordpress.org site) to post up a news item in both the news and mini feeds everytime you add a new entry. Better and better.

I’ve diatribed on the evils of MySpace before, and nothing has demonstrated to me just how badly designed the place is than trying to surf various profiles there on my laptop. A friend of mine gave me his old laptop a while back, and since I’ve been on my back for the last five weeks, I’ve been using it quite a lot for all my web surfing. This laptop is not what I would call a powerhouse – I usually have to reboot once or twice a day just to recover enough RAM to continue working. I don’t usually have too many problems, though, at least not until I surf over into MySpace. Suddenly, all my RAM is gone, my browser locks up for lengthy periods of time, and I can’t close the MySpace tabs I have open so that I can even reboot the laptop and attempt to rectify my mistake.

Facebook, on the other hand, has been extremely simple and light-weight to use. It has yet to cause to my laptop any issues or headaches. And the beauty of Facebook is that it seems to be infinitely more customizable than MySpace – and with less demand on your computer’s resources. Granted, most of the applications in Facebook I have no use for, but I do like the way I can make it merge so seamlessly with all of my WordPress installations. Facebook is also the thing that has gotten me using my wordpress.com account that I’d set up originally just for the API key for Akismet. Did I mention that I’m a WordPress fanboy?

So, yes, all this to say that I believe Facebook to be a far superior social networking system to MySpace. It’s built better, it runs better, and it just plain works better. I’ll likely be keeping my MySpace account, since I find it highly unlikely that everyone I have contact with there can be persuaded over to Facebook, but Facebook will continue to be my primary resource to maintaining quick and easy contact with people I know.

Of course, then again, there is always email.

Posted in thoughts | Comments (2)

Resetting HTML

July 22, 2007 – 10:45 pm

I’ve recently discovered the wonderfully marked-up Sandbox theme for WordPress and, in so doing, discovered the inspiration to build another theme for myself. But I also discovered rather quickly that there were a few minor problems with things not spreading out to the furthest edges of the browser. So I sought help and found that I needed to reset the margins for the html and body tags. I was also directed to this fabulous CSS entry called Reset Reloaded, which provides global resets for just about everything in a basic web page. I applied these and discovered the beauty of a WordPress theme with absolutely no formatting whatsoever. It’s a wonderful thing.

From there I’ve begun restructuring every element to my satisfaction, building what I need and want. And with Sandbox, this is made all the easier because everything has an id or a class (or multiple classes). All I have to do is look at the page source and see what tags are generated by the built-in code and then build the stylesheet accordingly. I’m working on a single-column, minimalistic theme with very few (if any) frills or flourishes. At this point, I’m thinking that most of the traditional sidebar content will also be shifted to a custom-built page template, but that one I’m going to have to work on a bit and see what comes of it. It’s a work in progress, and I’ll likely finish it up sometime later this week, due to the fact that there will be a brief pause in all coding work while I read the final installment of Harry Potter tomorrow.

If you’re a web coder, do check out Eric Meyer’s “Reset Reloaded.” I think you’ll like what you see and how much it cleans things up for you from the outset.

Posted in Design | Comments (0)

Theming

July 17, 2007 – 1:30 pm

One of the advantages of being flat on one’s back is I’ve had time to do a little WordPress theme design the last couple of days. I volunteered to host and build a new website for my parents’ church – the one they had before was, quite frankly, a ghastly design and layout and difficult to update and maintain. So, I moved their site to a WordPress installation on my server, and then set about modifying the Sandbox theme to my liking. I started out with something very plain and basic – no frills, just the basic elements in place – and ended up with something a bit nicer looking.

I don’t know if I’ll release this theme publicly or not. I’d have to clean up a couple of the files a bit, since I added some custom coding to make a couple of the plugins work correctly. But it might be worth it.

Posted in Design | Comments (0)

Copy-Pasted

June 28, 2007 – 9:57 am

In order to do my job properly for WLTC, I keep my ear to the WordPress ground for news about new themes and plugins. Much of this news comes into Google Reader from a couple of news feeds I subscribe to. I found an interesting one this morning that I had to chuckle about just a little – it’s a slightly different take on feed scraping. The blog entry I found pointed at one of the plugins in today’s writeup – and used my words verbatim. Granted, the guy added a couple more lines of explanation afterwards, so he at least had the decency to not completely plagiarize, but I had to laugh. And I don’t actually have a problem with his copy-pasting my words into his own entry, since I often just copy-paste what the plugin authors write themselves when they post their plugins into the various directories around the web (though I do often make minor edits to correct for spelling and grammar errors and to generally make the announcements much more readable). Mostly, I just thought it was interesting and amusing.

Posted in thoughts | Comments (0)